Archive of Disobedience, at Proa21, a community narrative about history

When Italian curator Marco Scotini began assembling the Archive of Disobedience in 2005, featuring the earliest contributions from artists around the world, he never imagined he was launching a traveling video library that would crown the Venice Biennale's main showcase in 2024.

Produced by Scotini, videos and short films by 39 artists and collectives, made between 1975 and 2023, participated in Venice. The collection mounted in the Arsenale section was highly diverse, with some of these artists from Latin America. It was Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director of the last International Biennial, who first drew attention to the extraordinary collection that the Italian curator has been producing over the past two decades.

Some of the artists and documentary filmmakers presented in Venice are returning to Proa21, such as Ursula Biemann, Seba Calfuqueo, Maria Galindo & Mujeres Creando, and Pedro Lemebel (who was also previously at Proa with his Yeguas del Apocalipsis recordings), among dozens included whose works range from short films, resembling moving paintings, to recordings of performances. With a new configuration, the Archive of Disobedience now offers local audiences a moving and evolving device. Presented fifteen times in different countries, the Archive never acquires a definitive configuration. Its enormous value, by placing artistic practices and political action in dialogue with different montages of the available recordings, is to propose a more communal or, if you prefer, parliamentary narrative .

The device is a generator of dynamic readings within what Scotini understands as "political art." In Venice, the curator presented something like the pre-film machine that animated the images and addressed two central sections: transnational migration processes and what he called "nomadic subjectivities" in light of gender. Diaspora and gender permeated that semicircular montage in a vast hall at the Arsenale. The Biennale was a major catalyst, the Italian curator tells Clarín . "Now the presentation schedule for the next two years is partly defined. They are planned at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, and then in Trenčín (in Slovakia), Cornwall, Mexico City, Thessaloniki, and Zurich," he shares.

There are several possible interpretations of Scotini's painstakingly articulated Archive. On the one hand, a look at our time, which is not just the here and now, but the enormous changes experienced globally in the last 20 years or more. On the other hand, a reading of contemporary art and the way audiovisual media has influenced that scene. We discussed this with the curator.

–The Archive of Disobedience changes as it moves. What is the purpose of this device that links artistic practices with political action?

–The Archive conceived as such, and in relation to this work in particular, is associated with a static theme, such as the nineteenth-century archive. In that archive, it was associated with social freedoms and based on history. In a way, this implied a typical construction. At the end of the Cold War, the archive shifted from being a historical model, which could be read as a vertical, linear issue, encompassing the past, present, and future, to a mobile archive, where what is archived can be unarchived, rearchived, and oxygenated with change and movement. The political dimension is very strong in this idea of ​​plastic temporality. With the new political model, after the Cold War, when politics was linked to political parties, unions, etc., that idea of ​​the archive is left behind, in favor of a political dimension of today. The idea of ​​the archive's mobility is different depending on whether you are in Buenos Aires, Venice, or South Africa. This idea of ​​mobility stems from the fact that there are similar materials in each of these sites, but articulated differently, which is why the Archive acts as a political device. It's a direct action, but different each time.

–Does contemporary art always have to be political for you? There are audiences who seek connection in other ways.

–For me, all art is political, even if one, as an artist, says they don't make political art. The issue lies between what would be emancipated art, from a social perspective, or playful art—that is, one that thinks of politics as imagination, experimentation, and social emancipation—and conservative art, which shares the same ideas as the classes that wield power. It's true that the audience that goes to the Venice International Biennale differs from that of Istanbul (where the Archive was presented in 2022) or at Proa21. At the Istanbul Biennale, the anonymous, weekend audience saw the Archive as a social rescue of their everyday things. In 2014, they had censored me, but then they suggested I present it again without censorship.

–In a world filled with noise, your Archive offers many voices speaking on many topics in the public debate. How do different audiences receive this proposal?

–One of the political aspects of the Archive is presenting it as a non-classical exhibition. It's more like a library. In classical exhibitions, one work of art comes after another. In the case of the Archive, everything is presented horizontally, accessible to the public simultaneously; it's the people who choose what they see and in what order, without following a curator's narrative. It's much more democratic. In fact, if one is more interested in issues of gender or social or economic emancipation, one finds those specific themes in the "library." In fact, those are three of the four axes present in the Proa21 exhibition. The Swiss filmmaker Jean-Luc Goddard questioned this way of presenting one image after another. This is related to the question of temporality in the modern archive, in which we are closer to the archive itself than to history. Today, a radical transformation of temporality is needed, between actuality and virtuality. Not so much a categorization under the labels of past, present, and future. In a way, that past is virtual in the current time. The historical avant-garde was called that because it came before... Today, a virtual present reigns in which artists are no longer interested in being avant-garde. Today, the idea of ​​time is plastic, emancipatory. There are archival films with materials from the past, like those by Harun Farocki, Alberto Grippi, and others, which use film and rearchive through montage. What interests me about these films is that they use re-editing, and that becomes a re-archive. In a way, the historical narrative can be changed. Before, one thought, "history cannot be changed," but contemporary artists have this possibility based on these changes in temporalities. Contemporary artists are not explorers of space, like Christopher Columbus, but above all of time. They go forward, they go back to go forward.

–How do artists participate in this collaborative project? How do you select your pieces?

-Indeed, the archive doesn't have a physical or online location. I require image authorization; some artists charge a fee, and others donate their works. What's interesting is that there are artists who have been part of the archive for 20 years and, although they weren't well-known when they started, are now recognized worldwide. The participation of Latin American artists is very high, and they have a great capacity for resilience. Every time an edition is made, we obtain permission. The archive manages different forms of exchange with them. The archive is a collaborative device that doesn't belong to anyone in particular ; it's collective, and I'm merely an activator. When we started in Berlin in 2005, many of these artists weren't well-known. The presence of Latin American artists depends on the research being done. Argentina, for example, is a social factory. Between 2001 and 2003, it became a major alternative laboratory and has been important in the launch of the Archive of Disobedience. There was a section called "Argentina, a Social Factory," because we in Italy saw it as a model case. I really like this invitation from Adriana Rosenberg, director of the Proa Foundation, because Argentina can have a new starting point in the Archive, with its capacity for resilience, alternatives, and imagination.

–The Archive's proposal for Proa21 is about "the street." Why did you decide on this section?

–My long-standing idea of ​​Argentina is its use of the street. It fascinates me. In Europe, we no longer understand what street use is. I remember when people talked about cacerolazos (pot-banging protests) and piqueteros (picket protests), even escraches (scraches), in Argentina, all of that constituted a space for political action. So I immediately thought of the street, as a place of imagination and encounter. In Argentina, everything happens in the street. There's an alternative and innovative production of political and social production in the street. Even performative forms of demonstration take place there.

The Archive of Disobedience will be at Proa21 until July of this year. The exhibition brings together 36 video works by international artists and collectives, organized in a three-stage cycle, with 12 videos in each, which are periodically renewed. Each stage unfolds a simultaneous journey through the four thematic axes that structure the project: gender disobedience, insurgent communities, radical ecologies, and diaspora activism.

Marco Scotini is the current artistic director of the FM Centro per l'Arte Contemporanea in Milan and head of the Department of Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at NABA (Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan). A prominent curator and art critic, he has curated over two hundred solo exhibitions and collaborated with art institutions such as Documenta, Manifesta, Van Abbemusuem, the Museo Reina Sofía, and other renowned cultural spaces. He was artistic director of the Gianni Colombo Archive from 2004 to 2016. Since 2014, he has been head of the Exhibition Program at Parco Arte Vivente (PAV) in Turin.